Guilds wishing to stockpile potions, poisons, adornments, lore & legend parts, and other supplies for their members have had little option but to cram all these items into the confines of their Guild Bank. When Guild Halls were added four years ago, one of the “home run” amenities was the Harvest Supply Depot, but it was limited to harvestables, and didn’t have enough slots to hold all adorning materials and other special ingredients. As an early Frostfell present, the EQ2 devs have added not one but seven more Depot types to encompass virtually everything that guildmates might want to share with each other (with the exception of Recipe books which will require some more code work).

Each depot is not cheap, with a cost of 25 plat and 5,000,000 status each, not to mention that they each take up an Amenity slot. However these have long been desired and should be popular with larger, established guilds.

Read more about Guild Depots @ EQ2 ZAM

Read more about Guild Depots @ EQ2Traders

In addition to a number of other player-requested changes, tweaks, and bug fixes, the coolest thing on the Test server right now may just be the evolution of the Guild Harvest Depot. The changes on Test dramatically increase the capacity and possible variety of materials which can be stored in the Guild Harvest Depot, as well as introducing a number of new types of storage container. With the new Depots, guilds will be able to de-clutter their Guild Bank of Poisons, Ammo, Totems (soon), Cure Potions, Food & Drink, Collectibles, Player-made Adornments, and Lore & Legend parts. These items will each go into their own storage containers.

From the Test Update notes:

• The maximum number of different resources that you can store in a Guild Harvest Depot has been increased from 200 to 1000.
• The maximum number of items in a single depot stack has been increased from 20,000 to 99,999.
• Several new Depots have been added as guild amenities! Check the “Depot” tab in your guildhall amenity list for details.
• You can now use the Deposit All button on depots to deposit every valid component from your bags.

If you’ve been keeping your Burynai house pet (from the Kunark Pre-Order) on a steady diet of fertilizers and letting the shinies roll in, you’ve probably noticed that they have had no luck producing any of the collections from Odus (Sundered Frontier, Stonebrunt Mountains), Velious (Great Divide, Eastern Wastes), or associated dungeons. It turns out, a new Guild Hall amenity has been added for these Tier 9 zones. Here’s Gninja to explain the new Herbalist Hirelings which accept fertilizer items in exchange for collectable rewards:

.. Right now you should be able to feed the “Herbalist Hireling” any combination of the three items and get a collectible from it. The [older] Burynai will only accept items up to tier8. Combinations using the Tier9 [materials] will not work with the Burynai.

Here are your update notes for December 21, 2010:

GENERAL

• This year you can support the Child’s Play charity by purchasing the new Cloak of the Snowfall from the Station Marketplace!

ITEMS

• Auto-consumed items such as the server merge titles will now be consumed on login if they were added while the player was offline.

AMENITES

Research Assistant amenities can no longer be purchased in a guild hall.

So it looks like Research Assistants weren’t so ready and willing to depart Guild Halls, despite yesterday’s hotfix. It looks like guilds did receive a refund, but the NPC is still on he list of Amenities and now counts against the number of amenities any guild can have. Fortunately, Rothgar has fixed the fix and we should expect it in the next scheduled hotfix.

Today’s hotfix refunds the purchase cost of Research Assistants, adds 200 house item slots to The Mistmoore Crags Estate and a few other things.  Read the full hotfix notes after the jump.

If you purchased a Research Assistant for your Guild Hall, you may have noticed that after today’s patch, he or she seems befuddled as exactly what to do now that players can tackle their own Spell Research from within their Knowledge window. Some have reported these despondent Research Assistants taking up crochet and browsing the want ads.

Since the Research Asssistant Guild Hall Amenity has both a recurring and up-front cost, some players have expressed their concern that choosing to Refund the amenity only returns 50% of the value of the amenity. Since a change in the game has rendered said amenity useless, should a 100% refund be due?

Rothgar is on the case, looking for an amicable solution. His quotes after the jump.

Incidentally, if you run a custom UI and are crashing whenever you open the Knowledge window, until your custom UI provider offers an update, you can temporarily delete these files from your custom UI folder:

• eq2ui_mainhud_knowledge.xml
• eq2ui_mainhud.xml

It turns out yesterday’s news on changes to the Training Dummies guild hall amenity was just the beginning.

Xelgad has updated us with news that one of the choices on the menu when summoning a Training Dummy (in addition to Solo, as well as Heroic and Epic which are new to GU56) will be an Encounter:

We’ve added a new set of dummies for GU56 that come as a linked encounter of a total of eight heroic training dummies. Enjoy!

This should provide many more options for players wanting to work on what order they cast spells and/or combat arts in for maximum DPS output.

In addition to the bigger content additions, Game Updates always include smaller, but no less desirable changes and tweaks.

Research Assistants Learn to Multitask

UPDATE: Oops! Despite appearing in the headline, this item somehow got left out!

UPDATE #2: This feature is in the April 20, 2010 Hotfix.

Bunji, member of the EQ2 QA Team, has posted this info on the EQ2 In Testing Feedback forums:

With the new Test server build, each character on an account can research a spell at the same time (this should not affect existing research).

Research times are also being tweaked (lowered).

Floating Disc Mounts

In response to a query about the floating disc mounts introduced in Sentinel’s Fate being slower, and with less stats than the Order of Rime mounts, Kander had this response:

I have upped the speed on several of the disc mounts, they now have a few stats as previous. Level 90 guild mounts are now 68%. Will be in with GU 56 or sooner.

As for the question of Appearance mounts, while we can’t expect them in GU56, Kander advised us to keep an eye out:

This is something we really want to do in the future, yes. It’s being discussed for future GU or exp07.

Kunark Blue Shinies Still Lore?

Echoes of Faydwer, the Rise of Kunark, and the Shadow Odyssey all added 20 or so collections. Each collection has historically had a rare item which could be used either to complete that collection, or to help complete separate collections. These are the Faydwer Expert Collection, Kunark Expert Collection, and Shadow Odyssey Expert Collection. The reward for completing each of these collections is a pair of goggles, or glasses, or a ring which then allows the wearer to see blue shinies (which spawn in specific locations, instead of at random) for the appropriate expansion.

The difficulty of collecting these blue shinies is that many of them have been flagged LORE, allowing only one to be picked up at a time, until it’s sold or traded.

In response to a complaint that Kunark shinies are still LORE, even in Sebilis, which at level 90 still has many green mobs, Kander had this news:

I will take a look at making these (Kunark Blues) no longer lore. I think that would be fine!

Training Dummies Go Epic

The Training Dummy Guild Hall Amenity has been very useful, however we’ve only been able to spawn a solo dummy, which has far too few hitpoints for more than 1 player to really test.

Rothgar has heard the call and will be adding Heroic and Epic versions of the Training Dummy:

I’ve already made a change to the dummy chest, it just hasn’t been released yet. You’ll get it with GU56.

You have the option to spawn a solo, heroic and epic dummy. Each will scale slightly larger in size and their hitpoints will be on par with mobs of that tier and level.

So now you can raid a training dummy if you like. These changes should be on the Test server if you want to check them out.

Training dummies don’t fight back, but they provide a useful punching bag for testing spell and combat art casting rotations. No word if we’ll be able to pick the level of the dummy. At level 80, you really want a level 87 dummy to test debuffs, etc. For now Rothgar is leaving them as they are:

The new dummies are exactly like the old ones, so they shouldn’t have any high resists or buff packages on them, just plain-ol-dummies.

Guild halls have an amenity available that allow a person to click on a chest and recieve a training dummy in their inventory.  Right clicking and choosing “use” places the dummy in the guild hall as an attackable object.  This is useful for trying out different casting orders, AA specs, gear, etc. to see what parses better.  The problem is that the training dummies don’t have enough hit points.  If the training dummy dies in 15 seconds, it doesn’t give you much time to determine anything.  Some people have used the training wall in Kunzar Jungle instead since it has more hit points than the training dummies, but there is only one of them per server and you have to travel to KJ to use it.  It would be nice if the training dummies came in more than one flavor.  Apparently Rothgar agrees:

I’ve already made a change to the dummy chest, it just hasn’t been released yet.  You’ll get it with GU56.

You have the option to spawn a solo, heroic and epic dummy.  Each will scale slightly larger in size and their hitpoints will be on par with mobs of that tier and level.

So now you can raid a training dummy if you like.  These changes should be on the Test server if you want to check them out.

Having personally spent many hours beating on training dummies with my assassin, this is really good news.  Depending on what procs when, the parses vary by a large margin.  Having the ability to have fights that last longer should even that out and make those parse runs much more useful.

While we don’t have all the details on what perks will be available to Guilds reaching the new level 90 cap, we know that Game Update #55 will add 2 new Guild Hall Amenities.

The first is pretty straightforward. It’s a Wizard Portal NPC with all the destinations available from the Ulteran Spires. It does not include the Kingdom of Sky zones of Tenebrous Tangle, Barren Sky, or Bonemire: Realm of Dawn. You’ll still need that amenity if your guildies are making regular use of these zones.

The second new Guild Hall Amenity is the Guild Standard Bearer. If you’ve ever been on a group or raid and just didn’t have the right setup. If only you had a little more oomph, more defensive stats, more DPS, etc. you could clear the zone and claim your reward.

The Guild Standard Bearer is a bit like a vending machine, selling (at a steep platinum cost) zonewide buffs to your allies within a group or raid instance. No doubt there will be more items added to this amenity over time.

Guild Standard (Click to Enlarge)

Updated Notes from Beta (added Friday, Feb 5th)

• These are only usable in Instances.
• They are not usable in Battlegrounds.
• We can expect more Standards to be added.
• Only one can be active inside a group dungeon or raid zone.
• Hopefully before Sentinel’s Fate launches, the descriptions for these items will contain specific numbers such as amounts of bonuses, etc.

EQ2Wire is providing continuing coverage of Game Update #55 (now on Test) and the Sentinel’s Fate expansion.

News is coming hot and fast now, so we’ve improved how news items are labeled and have added a News Ticker at the top of the site.

Don’t forget the UStream Sentinel’s Fate Beta Tour which will be led by Alan “Brenlo” Crosby. This is tomorrow Friday at 4PM PDT.

We are currently working on articles about the new Adornments, Guild Amenities, Leveling Tweaks, and a Zone List for the expansion.